A grammar of Greek art

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

The purpose and character of this little book may perhaps be best explained by a brief history of its genesis.

It is an urgent problem how best an elementary study of Greek art may be made a part of general classical culture and put on terms with the study of Greek and Eoman literature and history. In order to help toward a solution of this problem, I published two years ago a pamphlet on Classical Archaeology in Schools, 1 which has been read and considered by many teachers in England and America. It has, however, been pointed out to me that this essay, while it sets forth the practical possibilities of using archaeological aids in classical teaching, does not explain sufficiently what are the main principles of Greek art and what are its relations to literature. This defect I have tried to remedy in the present work, which is meant principally for men of classical training, and particularly for classical teachers in schools. It is scarcely adapted to the capacities of ordinary schoolboys. I had originally intended to incorporate with it the essay of which I have spoken ; but it was decided to keep that apart, in such a form that the list of apparatus could be at any time brought up to date.

Unquestionably the growing use of the lantern in colleges and schools and the enormous production of photographic

i Published by the University Press, Oxford, with an appendix containing lists of archaeological books and apparatus. Price, a shilling.

v vi PREFACE

slides to illustrate every part of ancient geography, topography, and archaeology have entirely altered in recent years the whole conditions of the study of archaeology, especially in its elementary form. It is now possible, at a trifling cost, to bring vividly before the eyes and the minds of students everything that remains of ancient Greece and Rome. But a great difficulty still remains to be met. This difficulty lies in understanding what these things mean, what they teach us, and how they may help us in preserving through the present to future generations something of the treasures of beauty, healthiness, and wisdom which have been bequeathed to us by the great nations of antiquity.

In order that we may understand what we see, certain principles of history, of art, of psychology, have to become familiar to us. What the more important of these principles are I have tried to set forth in these pages. The attempt is a somewhat novel one, though some archaeologists, in particular Professors Lange, Lbwy, and Robert, have formed paths which may be followed. Doubtless others before long will proceed further on these paths.

I should be sorry if it were for a moment supposed that any attempt was made in a little book like this to enable teachers who have not themselves had any practice or training in the study of Greek art to give such training to pupils. Archaeology, like every other branch of knowledge, must be laboriously and methodically studied before it can be taught to any purpose. And it can no more be learned from the mere perusal of books than can geology or natural history. Eye and mind alike have to submit to discipline. If my chapters tend to produce in classical teachers the semblance of archaeological knowledge without its substance, they will

PREFACE V ii

do no good. But this difficulty attaches to all works of the kind. I am in hopes that it may be possible at all events to persuade some of those responsible for classical teaching in our schools to make such arrangements that boys may have a chance of hearing something about ancient art from competent instructors. And I am in hopes that a general interest in the subject may be more widely spread among those who have no intention of becoming specialists or instructors. Whether these hopes are doomed to disappointment, time must show. But it is certain that there has arisen in some quarters a disposition to welcome experiments in this direction. Such an experiment is before the reader.

The illustrations in the text are of a varied character. Each of them was chosen, not for its own sake, but to illustrate some grammatical point in archaeology. I have had to borrow from many sources. In most cases I have asked a permission, which has been readily granted; if in some instances I have omitted making application for permission, I hope that this may be pardoned, in view of the full references to sources given in every case.

My brother, Professor Ernest Gardner, has been good enough

to read my proofs.

PERCY GARDNER.

Oxford, January, 1905.

Chapter I Page

Introductory : General Character of Greek Art ... 1

Meaning of the term " a grammar." Art like literature has a language which may be set forth, 1. The study of development contrasted with the search for origins, 3. Mistakes sometimes made, 6. Simplicity and intellectual character of Greek art, 7. Ideality of Greek art, 9. Idealism and naturalism, 11. Greek art generically ideal, 15.

CHAPTER II Ancient Critics on Art 17

Views of Socrates on art, 17. Views of Plato, 18. The Poetics of Aristotle, 19. Symmetry and rhythm, 22. Ethos and pathos, 24. Later critics, 27.

CHAPTER III Architecture 28

Influence of country and race, 28 ; of religion, 29. Plan of the temple, 31 . Simplicity, 33 ; careful proportions, 33. Decoration confined to useless parts, 34. Doric and Ionic styles, 36. Colouring, 37. Rational character, 38. Adaptation to perspective, 39.

Chapter IV

Sculptural dress not precisely that worn, 41. Ionian dress, 42. Dorian dress, 45. The overdress, 48, Mixture of dress in later art, 50. Dress passing into drapery, 52.

is.

CONTENTS

Chapter V Page

Character or Earliest Greek Art 55

Lange's doctrine of frontality, 56. Planes at right angles, 59. Psychological explanation of laws of frontality, 61. Shifting of weight to one leg, 64. Polycleitus and Praxiteles, 66. Treatment of the head, 68 ; of the eye, 70 ; of the hair, 72.

CHAPTER VI Sculpture : Material, Space, and Colouring .... 74

Materials : wood with inlays, 75 ; bronze, 76 ; marble, 77. Decorative and substantive art, 78. The temple, its decoration, 81. The pediment, 81 ; the metope, 86 ; the frieze, 87. Conventions: isocephalism, 91. Colouring of decorative sculpture, 92 ; of substantive sculpture, 94.

CHAPTER VII Formation of Sculptural Types 96

Independence of Greek sculpture, 96. Relation to athletics, 97. Selection and accumulation of beauty, 98. Figures of men and women, 100. Religious sculpture : anthropomorphism, 103. Rejection of symbolism', 105. Development of divine types, 106. Art related only to civic and poetic religion, 108.

CHAPTER VIII Sculpture and History 112

How far sculpture related to political history, 112. The sarcophagus of Sidon, 113. The sculptural decoration of the Parthenon and history, 114. Athenian and Spartan dedications at Delphi, 122. Vase representing feud of Asia and Europe, 123.

CHAPTER IX Greek Painting 126

Sources, 126. Pliny on painting, 127. Examples of early painting, 130. Polygnotus, 131. His methods, 132. Have we

CONTENTS xi

PAGE

copies of works of Micon ? 137. Early colouring, 143. Examples of later painting, 144. Painting less developed than sculpture, 150.

CHAPTER X Classes of Vases 152

Periods and schools of vase-painting, 152 Mycenaean, 153. Geometric, 153. Black-figured, 154. Red-figured, 156. White ground, 158. Forms of vases, 160.

CHAPTER XI Vases: Space, Balance, Perspective

Greek vases as wholes, 163. Conditions of space, 165. Char acteristics of early vases, 168. Balance and symmetry, 169 Relations of painting to vases, 171. Relations to space occu pied, 172. Groups, 174. Relations of one painting to another 176. Perspective on vases, 178.

Chapter XII

The use of fixed schemes, 182. Addition of figures to scheme, 187. Relation of painting to myth, 188. Chorus scheme, 192. Messenger scheme, 192. Development of a group : the sending out of Triptolemus, 194. Contamination, 198. Indications of locality, 202. Method of continuous narration, 204.

CHAPTER XIII Literature and Painting : the Epic 207

Ancient and modern illustration, 208. Influence of the epic on vases, 210. Influence on subject of paintings, 212. Influence on form of tale, 213. Examples: the abduction of Briseis, 215 ; the duel of Aeneas and Diomedes, 220 ; the horses of Rhesus, 221 ; the blinding of the Cyclops, 224 ; the Sirens, 226 ; Dionysus and the Pirates, 228.

CONTENTS

Chapter XIV Page

Literature and Painting continued : Lyric and Dramatic

Poetry 230

Influence on painting of lyric poetry, 230. Influence of tragedy, 232. Instances, 235. Orestes at Delphi, 237. Iphigeneia in Tauris, 239. Late vases and mural paintings, 241.

CHAPTER XV The Life-history of a Myth : the Judgment of Paris . . 244

Literary treatment of the subject, 245. Treatment on early vases, 246. Treatment on later vases, 249. Mistakes which have been made, 252.

CHAPTER XVI Coins in Relation to History 254

Information conveyed by coins, 254. Arrangement of coins in historic order, 257. Coins of fixed date ; the Damareteion, 258 ; coin of Dion, 260 ; coins of an Asiatic league, 260. Misreading of testimony of coins, 262. Copies of statues on coins, 263.

INDEX 265

A GEAMMAE OF GEEEK AET

CHAPTEK I

INTRODUCTORY : GENERAL CHARACTER OF GREEK ART

Just as the poetry and prose of the Greeks is expressed in a particular language, the words and the grammar of which must be studied by those who would understand the literature, so works of Greek painting and sculpture also are composed in what may be called a particular artistic language. 1 The words of that language are the strokes of the brush and the chisel ; but these are put together in order to embody Greek ideas in ways which are distinctive and not like those adopted by any other people ; certainly unlike those of modern art. The object of the present work is to set forth, as simply and directly as possible, what these ways are ; to define, in fact, the grammar of Greek art, and so render more intelligible the works of painting and sculpture which have come down to us from Hellenic antiquity.

Although the problem before us is one which can only be solved by a close and long-continued examination of the monuments of Greek art, yet it is at bottom psychological. We have to determine the laws according to which the mind, the taste, the hand of the artist, worked. "We are speaking of a generalized or ideal process. It will not, of course, be supposed that a sculptor or painter, before he set about his work, consciously or deliberately thought out the lines on which he 1 Welcker calls it a Zeichensprache, Alte Denkrnaler, III., p. xii.

B 1 should proceed. He went by the traditions of the craft, the customs of a school. But his unconscious process can be brought out in regular and methodical form ; and this is what I propose to do. In precisely the same way those who have never learned grammar may speak their own language grammatically enough. Unconsciously they follow laws of usage which have been laid down by the practice of generations. The grammarian can discover and set forth those laws, the statement of which, though less necessary to those who speak their mother tongue, is quite indispensable to those who have to learn the language as one foreign to them.

To the accidence of a language we may compare the simple laws of relation to material, of relation to space, of balance and proportion, which are unconsciously observed by the Greek artists. To the syntax of a language we may compare the relation of scene to scene, of picture to myth and to literature, of sculpture and coin to history. And art as a whole we may place beside the poetry and philosophy of Greece as a parallel manifestation of the genius of the race, in some directions an even clearer and more illuminating manifestation.

We start from the purpose of the Greek artist to produce a statue, or to paint a scene of Greek mythology. Whence this purpose came, we cannot always see. It may have come, at the lowest, from a commercial demand, or from desire to exercise talent, or from a wish to«honour the gods. This purpose works from within outward, and meets with controlling conditions, according to which its outward working is directed, conditions partjly belonging to the materials employed, partly to the artistic customs and traditions of the age, partly to the personality of the artist himself, and partly to the city or the race to which he belongs.

In its higher branches grammar touches psychology, and I shall not altogether avoid the psychology and the philosophy of art. Certainly I do not wish to limit myself to such formal and superficial rules as make up the bulk of our grammars. In fact, some parts of the present work may be said to lie between a psychology and a grammar. The reason of this is not far to seek ; and I must briefly set it forth.

If the creations of the Greek painter and sculptor had come down to us in full abundance and in their original beauty, the philosophy and the grammar of the subject would have lain apart, the first being primarily illustrated from those great works of art which fully embody the Greek character, the second from simple and commonplace efforts of the artists. But what we possess is but a remnant of the ancient splendour. In the case of architecture and sculpture, enough remains to show us what the Greeks could do : in the case of painting we have only work of a comparatively poor or hasty character. It is therefore natural in dealing with sculpture to proceed in a more philosophical way, and in dealing with painting, to proceed on the humbler lines of grammar. Perhaps by following this course I have somewhat injured the unity of this work ; but it does not appear that much would have been gained if I had divided it in two. The reader must always remember that in criticising sculpture we are at a higher level than in criticising vase-painting, and he must not expect the impossible.

The study of an evolution among surrounding and limiting conditions is the complement, and in many ways the opposite, to that search for origins which in our Darwinian age attracts so much intelligence. Numberless investigators are now occupied in tracing all the ways of civilization to their origins, or at least to the earliest form of them which can be discovered. This search is, of course, of the greatest value, quite essential to all scientific history, and throwing rays of light over some of the darkest fields. Without reaching the origin of a custom in art, in religion, in institutions, we can never be sure that we have rightly apprehended it. But at the same time it is necessary to guard oneself against a prevalent delusion, the fancy that when the origin of any phase of human life is discovered, that phase is explained and understood. It is a great thing to reach the railway station from which one sets out on a journey, but starting from that station one may go many ways and travel with various purposes. What is really most important and interesting in the civilization of a race is not the foundations, which are probably very much like those whence other races make their start, but what the race adds of its own, the way in which the national ideas are embodied. What is most interesting in the English character is that in which we differ from other peoples. That which is really important in Jewish or in Greek religion is not the mere myth which belongs to all peoples at a certain stage of civilization, nor the primitive beliefs in ghosts and agricultural superstitions, but what the Jews and the Greeks respectively add to the common stock of religion, as they emerge into a higher civilization.

The case is similar in regard to Greek art. Of late years there has been carried on an unwearied search into primitive art — that of the Mycenaean and Minoan ages — and no one should undervalue a quest which has revealed to us so much in regard to the habits, the religion, the architecture, and the painting of the early peoples of the Mediterranean area. But such investigations do not greatly increase our knowledge of Greek art. They suggest that the Greeks may have borrowed certain rudiments from races which preceded them in the lands which were later to be theirs ; but they do not throw much light on the process by which, out of simple and rude beginnings, the Greek spirit built up a magnificent fabric of art which can never cease to raise and instruct mankind. For the architecture, the sculpture, and the painting which have been found in the palace of Cnossus and in the graves of Mycenae, though astonishinglydeveloped, and sometimes even modern in appearance, are entirely wanting in the characteristics of Greek work. Whether the Mycenaeans were of the same race as the later Achaeans or not, they certainly completely differed from them in all that belongs to art. The Greeks are in many things our spiritual ancestors, the Mycenaeans scarcely lie in the direct line of our spiritual ancestry. Compare the parallel case of literature. The investigation of the forms of letters in the earliest alphabets has its value, and the primitive inscriptions cut in terra-cotta and on stone by the early peoples of Asia Minor and the Aegean are not without importance; but the interest of such things pales beside that of the great literature which has inspired so much of modern history and poetry and philosophy. Greek art has not, in northern Europe, had the same vogue as Greek literature; yet at some periods, and in some lines of civilization, it has been of untold value, throwing into the shade mere questions of origin..

It is unnecessary that I should try to emphasize the value of Greek literature. The value of Greek 'art is less generally recognized. Of course to us in England ancient literature must always be of far greater interest and value than ancient art, for the simple reason that we are a literary nation, but not an artistic nation. Yet we have our artists, and are not unaffected by the growing importance of art in the modern world. It is because of our neglect and misunderstanding of ancient art, among other causes, that our artists are, as a rule, so poorly trained, and have to go to Paris and Rome to learn their business. General education has also suffered from the same cause. We have been one-sided. Every one who has studied both the literature and the art of Greece

6 A GRAMMAR OP GREEK ART chap.

must have discovered that the principles of both are exactly alike, that the Greek drama and the Greek temple, for example, are constructed on parallel lines, and equally embody the aesthetic ideas of the race. These general remarks will, it is hoped, receive constant enforcement and illustration in the course of the following pages.

It is of course possible to schematize too much, to lay down in too dogmatic a fashion in what way the Greek spirit acts under certain conditions. Those conditions vary from period to period and from school to school. It is only a full and careful consecutive study of the history of ancient art which can give one the right to generalize. But generalization, though difficult, is possible; and the student who is bewildered with the number of the schools and artists in Greece ; who, after toiling for months and years at certain classes of statues or vases, loses sight of the relation of those classes to the main stem of Greek life, may find it useful and profitable to turn from the material side. of ancient monuments to their formal side, to look on thein not merely as productions of a certain time and place, made in a certain material, but as a visible embodiment of mental processes, as the result of the outward working of the Greek spirit on the world around.

It is easy to illustrate by means of examples the mistakes into which a misunderstanding of the underlying laws or fconditions of Greek art may mislead a modern observer. Some critics have complained of Homer because his heroes are made to pause in the midst of the battle turmoil to discuss their respective ancestry and achievements. Others discuss the action of such dramas as the Agamemnon or the Alcestis, without taking into account the strict conditions of the Greek stage, with its masks and buskins and trailing robes, contrived specially to remove the scenes portrayed from likeness to the scenes of daily life. Others suppose the speeches by means of which Thucydides explains the relations of the Greek states to one another to have been actually uttered by the statesmen into whose mouths he puts them. In the same way some writers have gravely maintained that what is represented in the frieze of the Parthenon is not the Panathenaic procession, certain important elements of which appear to be wanting, but a dress rehearsal for that procession. In each case the root of the mistake is the same, the direct comparison of a work of art with nature, and its condemnation because it conforms to a subjective rather than an objective law; in fact, ignorance of the grammar of the language of ancient art. To understand a work of art we must consider not merely what in fact it represents, but also the conventions of the artist, as determined by his period, his school, his range of ideas. We must look at it not only in relation to nature, but also in relation to the human spirit, and the laws -. according to which in various countries that spirit works in the world of art.

Taine begins his little work on the philosophy of Greek art by sketching the nature of the Greek lands and people, detailing the external conditions among which their art grew up. Strictly speaking he is quite right. Climate and geographic facts and the physical construction of the race are important factors in the rise of art. I shall not, however, follow Taine's example, partly because travel has made these facts familiar to most educated men, partly because an account of physical Greece may be found in many works, for instance, in C'urtius' History of Greece. 1 I shall therefore pass on to say a word as to the aesthetic and intellectual qualities of the people.

i Also, on a smaller scale, in the first chapter of Gardner and Jevons, Manual of Greek Antiquities.

8 A GRAMMAR OE GREEK ART chap.

Greek art, like Greek poetry and philosophy and geometry, seems constructed with extreme simplicity, when compared with the more complicated productions of modern Europe: herein lies its main attractiveness, and its educational value. It exhibits the working of a race the civilization of which was very simple and harmonious, of a race gifted by nature with the finest aesthetic and intellectual qualities, so that to the end of time the Greeks will stand out against the background of ancient history as a natural aristocracy, and always furnish us with models which in their own way, and within the limits which they acknowledged, will be unsurpassed. Modem life is more ambitious and more complicated : we have learned the ways of progress as the Greeks never learned them, so that to us in many respects they seem to be like children. But each man as he grows up passes through the various stages of culture which lie behind us; and to a certain stage in growth and education the teaching of Greece is of unequalled value. And besides, the wonderful natural endowments of the Hellenic race were such that the most cultivated of modern minds, a Goethe, a Matthew Arnold, a Sainte-Beuve, will to the end find in Greek literature and art a freshness, simplicity, and charm which may be sought in vain elsewhere.

Matthew Arnold, with his usual insight, has observed that it is in sense and in intellect that the Greek is supreme. The eyes and ears of the ordinary Greek man may not have been so acute in observing minute or distant detail as the senses of the savage, whose whole living depends upon their efficiency. But in delicacy of aesthetic perception, of the relations of parts to a whole, of the value of a curve, of the suitability of a musical note, they excelled beyond compare. And in sheer intelligence, in logical power, and a perception of the relation of means to ends, the Greeks are found to be supreme. It was mainly through clearness and taste that literature, philosophy,

GENERAL CHARACTER OF GREEK ART 9

sculpture, painting, rose among them not merely to a level quite beyond comparison with that of ancient peoples, but to a height which has in some ways scarcely been reached by the most gifted nations of modern times.

I find it necessary, to my great regret, to confine my attention, in this book, to the art of autonomous Greece, between the rise of Hellenic civilization and the days of Alexander the Great. At this last point the history of Greece divides into two. Until the time of Alexander she was occupied in forming herself; afterwards her matured powers were devoted to the education of the world, the eastern world and the western. The latter half of this wonderful history is perhaps not less interesting and important than the earlier. But it is more complicated; and we are unable to use for its study such admirable guides as the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. In the matter of art, the regular course of evolution is in this latter period crossed by many fresh tendencies, and divided into a multitude of streams. A work on the art of the later age of Greece, the age of Hellenism, is greatly needed. But even if the later history of art were as clearly marked out as the earlier, it would be impossible within the limits of the present work satisfactorily to include an account of it. We can only hope to discover the principles and tendencies of Greek art in its various branches, by taking it up while it is comparatively free from foreign admixture, and unadapted to the needs of the non-Greek races who became half Hellenized during the three centuries which passed between the time of Alexander and the beginning of the Christian era.

One cannot too strongly emphasize the fact that Greek art was from first to last ideal. Some writers speak of the realism of Lysippus or of the Pergamene sculptors, or even of the naturalism of some works of the fifth, century. The reader is apt to suppose that in some of the Greek schools there prevailed a naturalism not unlike that which we find in some modern schools. This is quite a false view. I must explain in what sense the ideality of Greek art must be taken.

It is not possible in painting to reproduce with literal precision the forms of nature, since man has two eyes and the canvas is flat, since colour can never fully give the effect of light, and so forth. In sculpture it is\niore possible closely to follow nature, though even in the most naturalistic portraits hair and beard and eyes have to be rendered without literalness. But sculpture which merely closely follows ordinary types of nature is so profoundly uninteresting that it has no valid reason for existing. A precise copy in bronze of an ordinary ass would be on the same level as a stuffed ass.

It is clearly proved by modern psychology how crude is the notion of " the man in the street " that what an artist has to do is to look at a person, an animal, a scene, and. then copy it on his canvas. It is certain, as I shall show more at length in a future chapter, that art originates not in the direct copying of nature, but in a mental reconstruction, which has a basis of observation. This reconstruction is, it is true, ordinarily quite unconscious, but it occurs nevertheless. And the human and subjective element which intervenes at the beginning of art accompanies every phase of it to the end. Sometimes this subjective element is individual. Thus there has always been in art an element which we may term impressionism. Conscious impressionism is modern ; unconscious is very old.

I must not, however, allow myself to be led by the word impressionism into the deep places of art criticism. I will only say that I cannot regard it as fair to appropriate the word to a special school of modern painters, who have paid particular attention to the effects of light. Dr. Wickhoff has maintained, 1 and I think with justice, that in the Roman art of the Early Empire there is a good deal of impressionism. In Greek art, as is natural from its thoughtful and consistent character, there is less. I shall, however, confine myself to speaking of the two great tendencies which dominate the history of art until recent times, naturalism and idealism, the objective and the subjective spirit.

Naturalism or realism is an attempt to mimic the details of visible things. This is an attempt which lies very much in the way of a modern artist. Of the anatomist he learns the forms, not of the outward appearance of man, but of the inner structure underlying that appearance. From photography he learns the precise lines of natural objects, and carries them with him into his studio. Instantaneous photography reveals the intimate ways of motion so swift that observation cannot follow it. So he is tempted to spend his life in struggling to learn more and more of the details of nature, in order that he may embody them in his art. Kealism in art has in many schools been carried to a great length. Some careful study of natural fact is necessary as a basis for any great school of art. The Assyrians carefully studied the lion and the wild horse, the Greeks made most exact study of the human body in all motions and poses, though without at first giving attention to anatomy. The Japanese observe plant life, and some forms of animal life, with astonishing minuteness and accuracy. The artists of the early Renascence were also minute in their observation of plants, like the Preraphaelites of the last century. But realism cannot be carried beyond a certain point, because it then ceases to produce anything of interest, and a too precise study of fact brings with it dangers of its own. The anatomist is apt to dull his sense of beauty and deformity.